How Is An Egg Donor Like A Prostitute?

A few weeks ago, House Bill 3077, which would make it illegal to compensate women for oocyte donation, easily passed the Oklahoma house by a vote of 85-8. Said Rep. Rebecca Hamilton, D-Oklahoma City, the bill’s author, fertility clinics "could use donor eggs all they want; they just can’t go out and solicit women with money.” According to news reports, Hamilton has likened the practice to prostitution, claiming that “it turns doctors into predators.” 

The debate harkens back to an exchange in September, in which Dr. Naomi Pfeffer drew fire for a statement to the Motherhood in the 21st Century Conference at the University College London that compared egg donors to prostitutes.  As reported in The Times:

British couples who travel abroad for IVF treatment and buy other women’s eggs are engaging in a form of prostitution, a fertility conference was told yesterday. . .

Professor Pfeffer, who researches controversial developments in medicine, told the Motherhood in the 21st Century Conference at University College London: “The exchange relationship is analogous to that of a client and a prostitute. It’s a unique situation because it’s the only instance in which a woman exploits another woman’s body….

These women are being encouraged to take real risks with their health through ovarian stimulation and egg retrieval. It commodifies women’s bodies and treats their reproductive capacities as a service.

So, what sort of crazy person would compare an egg donor to a prostitute?

I would.  But not for the reasons that either Hamilton or Pfeffer have in mind. 

As I argue in the recently posted, A Woman’s Worth, an egg donor is much like a prostitute in the following sense: both are selling something that is often expected or encouraged to be given for free or at a reduced price, despite its high economic value. 

Like many taboo markets, the markets for sex and oocytes present a paradox. These robust commercial industries attract large numbers of suppliers and consumers, yet continue to be regarded as socially problematic—perhaps deviant or repugnant—and in need of strict controls. Even when legal, taboo markets and those who supply them may be stigmatized, like the prostitute, or, like the egg donor, romantically recharacterized as an altruistic nonmarket transactor whose economic exchange is limited in ways that other markets are not.  I contend that these tendencies are often the product of unexamined instincts and are laden with class and gender prejudices and anxiety about the body, especially women’s bodies, that have little relation to the stated objections to the underlying transaction.

Oklahoma Rep. Ryan Kiesel, who objects that the law is discriminatory because it is directed only at women, tried unsuccessfully to amend the bill to also prohibit men from selling sperm.  The differential treatment of egg and sperm donors and, in particular, the very different assumptions regarding their motivations for “donating” reproductive tissue is a subject I explore at length in Sunny Samaritans and Egomaniacs: Price-Fixing in the Gamete Market. 

Oocyte donation presents health risks that sperm donation does not. Yet, the widely articulated coercion concern raised against compensated egg donation is particularly one that should be carefully scrutinized for class and gender bias. There are many dangerous jobs regularly performed for compensation, often by employees with lower socio-economic status and education levels than egg donors (who are often valued for their academic credentials, among other characteristics).  Those jobs are also performed primarily, if not exclusively, by men. For example, fishing, logging, aircraft pilot, and construction top the list of the most dangerous jobs, and more than ninety-two percent of all workplace fatalities are men.  (See here for more discussion of these points).

But, thank goodness we can now count on the fine minds in the Oklahoma legislature (as well as New York’s and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine) to protect women from the possibility of earning too much money.

(HT: Naomi Cahn)

Related Posts:

Like A Virgin? We Sell That Here!
Sunny Samaritans or Entrepreneurs? New York Allows Egg Donor Payments For Stem Cell Research
A New Meaning To "Nest Egg"
U.K. To Reconsider Payments to Egg and Sperm Donors

Comments

[praymont]

It isn't like prostitution, but it (and sperm selling) should be banned based on a principle that has motivated adoption laws, namely, that while one may sever one's ties to one's offspring, one may not make money in exchange for doing so. Echoing Elizabeth Anderson, family ties are beyond market-place norms -- they ought not to be loosened by monetary incentive.

[Matt]

Something that I wonder: I doubt that most egg donors are tall, thin, ivy-league under-grads. But my impression is that that is a sort of stereotype, and you do see adds for egg donors in places like the Penn student newspaper, often with pretty high payment offered. Do you think that there might be some feeling that people using egg donors are "cheating" in some way, trying to get "better" kids, and that this might lead to resentment and perhaps class anxiety? I can imagine that this sort of desire for people not to "cheat" by paying "exceptional" donors for eggs might be behind some moves to ban such sales, though of course it's hard to know what the psychology behind it is.

[baby2mom Egg Donation and Surrogacy Agency]

Egg donation is legal, encouraged and permitted in South Africa. Egg donors are given a small donation to partipate in the egg donor program. The egg donation amount is however limited to a marginal amount and the recruitment of egg donors is prohibited by momey.

[Kim Krawiec]

Hi Matt -- I think you're absolutely right that one of the concerns people express about egg donation is of the "building a better child" type. But this alone doesn't distinguish the egg market from the sperm market. Sperm donation has a quite ugly eugenics-based history, starting with the Nobel sperm bank, and even today sperm donors, like egg donors, are valued for specific traits, including height, ethnicity, and the like. Though, as I discuss in Sunny Samaritans, the traits valued in egg donors seem a bit different from those valued in sperm donors, and differential egg donor pricing is a bit more visible to the general public than is the case with sperm donors, for a variety of reasons.

Praymont -- you are right that this would be Anderson's contention. However, family ties have not, in fact, ever been beyond market pricing norms, nor are they now. This is especially true in the adoption market, a point I discuss here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1212656 and here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1342710